urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: "Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried." J afar's response, ac- cording to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued: Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. "The answer was none." . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the UNSCOM [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions r were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]-"give them everything." The notes saId that Jafar was then asked, "But this doesn't mean allW.M.D.? How can you be certain?" His answer was clear: "I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D." Jafar explained why Saddam had de- cided to give up his valued weapons: Up unti] the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. "No way we could escape the United States." Therefore, the W.M.D. war- heads did Iraq little strategic good. Jafar had his own explanation, ac- cording to the notes, for one of the en- during mysteries of the U.N. inspection process-the six-thousand-warhead dis- crepancy between the number of chem- ical weapons thought to have been man- ufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this dis- crepancywhich led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi govern- ment had simply lied to the United Na- tions about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen- eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thou- sands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all. There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment ofW.M.D.s. wowd have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorse- ment of Jafar's integrity came trom an unusual source-Jacques Baute, of the I.AE.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with J afar and the other W.M.D. scientists and techni- cians of Iraq. "I don't believe anybody," Baute told me, "but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate." I n early October, David Kay, the fonner U.N. inspector who is the head of the Administration's Iraq Survey Group, made his interim report to Congress on the status of the search for Iraq's W.M.D.s. "We have not yet found stocks of weapons," Kay reported, "but we are not yet at the point where we can say de- finitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war." In the area of nuclear weapons, Kay said, "Despite evidence of Saddam's con- tinued ambition to acquire nuclearweap- ons, to date we have not uncovered evi- dence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material." Kay was Widely seen as having made the best case possible for President Bush's prewar claims of an imminent W.M.D. threat. But what he found fell far short of those claims, and the report was regarded as a blow to the Administration. President Bush, however, saw it differentl)T. He told reporters that he felt vindicated by the re- port, in that it showed that "Saddarn Hussein was a threat, a serious danger." The President's response raises the question of what, if anything, the Admin- istration learned from the failure, so far, to find significant quantities ofW.M.D.s in Iraq. Any President depends heavily on his staff for the vetting of intelligence and a reasonable summary and analysIs of the world's day-to-day events. The llitimate authority in the White House for such is- sues lies with the President's national- security adviser-in this case, Condoleezza Rice. The fonner White House official told me, "Maybe the Secretary of De- fense and his people are short-circuiting the process, and creating a separate chan- nel to the Vice-President. Still, at the end of the day all the policies have to be hashed out in the interagency process, led by the national-security adviser." What happened instead, he said, "was a real ab- dication of responsibility by Condi." Vice- President Cheney remains un- abashed about the Administration's re- liance on the Niger documents, despite the revelation of their forgery: In a Sep- tember interview on "Meet the Press," Cheney claimed that the British dossier's charge that "Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Mrica" had been "revalidated." Cheney went on, "So there may be a difference of opinion there. I don't know what the truth is on the ground. . . . I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably showdn't judge him." The Vice-President also defended the way in which he had involved himself in intelligence matters: "This is a very im- portant area. It's one that the President has asked me to work on. . . . In tenns of asking questions, I plead guilty: I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That's my job." . ''I'm sorry-I'm totally blanking on your species. "